was dashed to the earth, the wheels of
the chariot of the destroyer of her race passed over her, and the feet
of the horses trampled upon her. "And the dogs ate Jezebel by the walls
of Jezreel." Thus her doom was accomplished!

[Illustration]

There have been many like her. Her crimes have been sometimes equalled
in atrocity. Her ruling passions were pride and ambition; and she
doubtless clung to the idols of her land from the unbounded license
their worship gave to sensuality, and the opportunities it afforded, in
its feasts and festivals, for display and gayety.

But she clung more tenaciously to her idolatry from motives of
self-interest and national aggrandizement. It was the test of loyalty
for Israel. It was in perfect consistency with such a character to turn
away from all evidence and to reject what she did not wish to believe.
In the expressive language of the Bible, she "hardened her heart;" and
doubtless, like skeptics of later days, she could ascribe what she could
not disprove to the working of natural causes, or to the arts of
priestcraft.

We can all stifle the convictions of conscience and contemn the
principles which conflict with our interest or our inclination; and
there are in every station unconscious imitators of the Queen of Israel.

[Illustration]

ATHALIAH.

[Illustration]

The pious king of Judah not only formed a political alliance with
Israel, but he even permitted, and probably encouraged, his son, and the
heir to his throne, to marry the daughter of the impious Ahab and the
idolatrous Jezebel. Jehoshaphat saw not the Queen of Israel as we see
her--as unlovely as she was unholy. Dazzled by the splendour of her
court, won by her grace and queenly bearing, he may have overlooked her
crimes. The most unprincipled have sometimes carefully and successfully
cultivated much that gives grace and attraction to social life. Some,
whose hearts have been utterly selfish and callous, and whose lives have
been one dark record of crime and cruelty, have yet shone as the centres
of splendid circles, diffusing all around them pleasure and gayety. And
men, themselves unstained, have been won by these fascinations to a
close association with those whose principles were worthy only of
reprobation, and whose association should have been shunned as in the
last degree contaminating.

The intimacies between those who love and worship God and those who
reject him are ever full of danger. And whi